Six weeks later…
I’m learning what works for me and doesn’t, at least right now. (Everything’s going to change, right? When I buy a house, when the library goes back to a normal post-COVID schedule, when my kiddo moves out, when the seasons shift. I’m trying to be comfortable with the prospect of big changes while also being present in the moment.) I’d planned to make a #TBRpile post every Friday, but I seem to be managing it every other Friday, so I’m just going to say that that’s what I’m doing.
My reading choices have been absolutely all over the map, partly because I’ve been trying to clear out the oldest things on my “want to read” lists (that I still want to read) – right now I’m working through things that have been hanging out on my Goodreads list since fall of 2016 – but I’m also trying to keep up with new releases and new discoveries. Delving deep and reading three or four books in a row on a topic, or in a genre, is just not happening.
And that makes it sound like reading is a chore, which it absolutely is not – I’m deeply, deeply enjoying the idea of “wintering” and leaning in to the desire to just sink into coziness and quiet and read the winter away.
The two novels in those #TBRpile pictures – Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor and Anxious People by Frederick Backman – were both delightful, in different ways. Lagoon is dark and weird and truly speculative in the best sense, and Anxious People is sweet and gentle and uplifting but just as thought-provoking. The biography of the friendship between Auguste Rodin and Rainer Maria Rilke, You Must Change Your Life, was fascinating and heartbreaking. The Emotional Craft of Fiction was superb, and I’m planning to buy a copy. The Making of Manners and Morals is part of a rabbithole of research I’m going down about early Medieval English food and food culture, so expect more on that topic in the next few months.
That big thick brown book with the title too small to see is Mechanick Exercises On The Whole Art Of Printing by Joseph Moxon, published in 1683 and 1684, the earliest and one of the most comprehensive studies of the trade. I’ve only gotten as far as the introduction, so I’m looking forward to digging into it during this long weekend.
But what’s really enthralled me in the last few weeks were those two gardening books.
The subtitle of Uprooted (A Gardener Reflects on Starting Over) spoke to me, and that’s exactly what it’s about. After 34 years of crafting three acres of intensively managed gardens and eight deeply place-centric books about garden design, Page Dickey came to terms with the fact that her beloved property at Duck Hill in upstate New York was no longer sustainable for her, so she and her husband looked for, and found, a new place – larger but lower-maintenance, with seventeen acres of woods and meadows around a little house in much less expensive rural Connecticut, and set out to create something new. Five years on, this is her look back.
Five years on… if I’d known then what I know now, I’d have done so much differently at the Walsenburg house! I knew a tiny bit about xeriscaping and a tiny bit about very standard, mainstream vegetable gardening (which, in southeastern Colorado, are two non-overlapping categories) and nothing whatsoever about garden design. I struggled and fought and mostly failed, and I was just almost starting to know which direction I was moving with the property when I left. And in five years of apartment living and exploring Denver’s many parks and gardens and constantly taking in, and thinking, and having questions and finding answers, and developing my aesthetic, and listening to more experienced gardeners, I am ready (so fucking ready) to try again, to get it right.
I’ve been looking at Planting in a Post-Wild World out of the corner of my eye from time to time for as long as I’ve been at Belmar (it was published about six months before I started working there) and a few weeks or so ago, fresh off of a visit to the Denver Botanic Gardens absorbing the stark midwinter beauty, I was making the books pretty in the 700s and I put it on display and then took it right back down again and took it home.
I definitely wouldn’t have been ready for this book in 2016, but – funny how it works out – I felt ready this winter. What the authors are doing is not exactly permaculture (although there are similarities – thinking in terms of the whole site, including the humans and animals that move through it, as a holistic, self-reinforcing system) or native-plant gardening or xeriscaping (although they draw heavily on principles from both) but a sort of pragmatic synthesis of all three, adapted to urban environments and the remediation of disturbed land. The book is really geared more toward professionals than home gardeners, although there’s a lot that an owner-manager of a property can get out of it, especially if starting from scratch on a damaged piece of land, which I expect to be. It’s about the idea that working with the land rather than against it, starting with and learning from the plants that naturally thrive in the soil and climate that’s there, and balancing usefulness with a sense of wild beauty is absolutely possible and desirable even in the conditions farthest from pristine virgin wilderness. It gave me a lot to think about; I’ve been feeling frustrated and thwarted because there’s only so much visioning I can do before I know the particulars of the site I’m going to have to work with, but these two books have definitely helped to clarify where I can productively reflect and plan and where I would just be spinning my wheels.
A friend of mine used to call Candlemas “the festival of the seed catalog.” This has been a year in which it’s been hard to look forward to much of anything, but the sense that spring is coming, that change is coming, that there is something to look forward to, is getting stronger every day.